Eleanor Tullock

Love Machines: I drink your milkshake

RMIT University, Master of Architecture, Graduate Project 2015

Supervisor: Dr Michael Spooner

Love Machines is about the East-West Link. I am not proposing to build it. Rather, I am giving a presence to a line that has never quite existed. It begins with a highly prejudiced exploration of the intended site for the East-West link entry and exit, and the space that converges above the intended subterranean path, using the never realised infrastructure as a lens to experience the city. This is an archaeological process to find intersections and conflicts in micro-political form. The provocations left an indelible mark prompting the establishment of individualist, anti-authoritarian, spontaneous communities and all the continuing neurosis and celebrations which became their catalyst.

These investigations converge on the actual geography of the site creating a leyline of synchronous architectural moments. Four specific sites have been pinpointed for architectural intervention. Four resultant architectural interventions plug the leyline, to keep things from spilling out and that reframe our relationship with the city. Within the framework of trouble making, a found history of ‘shit-stirrers’ and exploiting conditions of uncertainty I attempted to establish pockets where the real is experienced concurrently with the virtual and the imagined.

This is not necessarily about finding new formulations of space but re-establishing ourselves, the Architect, on a new rhetoric of stewardship. We are stewards of the mundane, the eczema and the ridiculous — the 90% of buildings that have been built without architects that exist in a kind of spatial purgatory. These foundations privilege an antagonistic narrative approach to try and create, as much as negotiate, uncertainty.

When architecture is embedded within a series of concentric catastrophes that gives the world its timing, qualities and disposition, each catastrophe is an event that radically modifies the possible, opens up previously inconceivable futures and halts the inevitable in its tracks.